Outside, the night was dark but the sky clear and the stars brilliant. For a while they walked almost in silence, exchanging only an occasional remark. They had taken a side path that wound its way among trees and bushes. Adam could feel his heart hammering. Chela's hand lay lightly on his arm, he was breathing in the heady scent she was wearing and was intoxicated by her nearness. They had met no one and the place was so deserted that they might have been alone in another world. He felt an almost irresistible desire to take her in his arms and kiss her. That she had suggested the walk could possibly be taken as an invitation to do so. But until that night they had hardly known each other. Mexicans' ideas about behaviour might be different from those current in England. Perhaps she looked on him only as a new friend who could be trusted. If he took advantage of their being alone together she might resent it intensely. Then there would be a premature end to this wonderful companionship. He dared not risk that. Yet if he did not seize this chance she might think him only half a man, lose interest in him and never give him another opportunity.
He was still wrestling with the question when he heard a rustle in the bushes behind him. He had only half turned when a ragged figure sprang out with a knife raised high to stab him in the back.
Chela had turned at the same moment. In one swift movement she pulled the muslin wrap from her shoulders and swept it forward so that it entangled the knife and the arm of the man who had been about to stab Adam. Leaping back a pace, Adam raised his fist, lunged forward and hit the man hard in the face. With a loud moan he went over backwards, dropped his knife, rolled sideways, scrambled to his feet and made off into the bushes.
Adam took a stride to go after him, but Chela grabbed his arm and pulled him back, 'No she exclaimed. `Let the poor devil go. If I had been with any other man he would only have demanded money from us. It was because you are so big that he hadn't the courage to face up to you.'
A little reluctantly Adam said, `All right then. But he might have given me a nasty wound. I owe it to your presence of mind that he didn't, and I'm very grateful. But for that I might now be lying here a bloody mess while you were being raped by that desperado.'
She gave a low laugh. `I don't think so. You see, I was rather
hoping that something like this might happen, just to find out how you would behave. And as I had decided before we left the apartment to take you out for a walk, I came prepared for trouble.' as she spoke she lifted one side of her long, full, satin gown, displaying a lovely, long leg up to the thigh. Strapped to the outside of it was a blue velvet holster containing a small, flat automatic. `Good Lord alive!' Adam exclaimed. 'Do Mexican girls usually tote guns?'
`'They do when they expect to find themselves faced with unpredictable situations.'
He grinned. `I've come across ladies who carry guns only in thrillers, and they always keep them in their handbags. I'd have thought they were easier to get at quickly than under a skirt.' `On the contrary.' She had let her skirt fall. Now she slid her hand through a placket hole in its folds above her hip. In a second she had whipped out the small pistol and had him covered with it. Giving him an amused smile, she said, `You see. That's much quicker than having to open a bag.'
He willingly conceded the point, at the same time thinking, What a wicked piece of loveliness. She could have done that before, but she wanted to show me that glorious leg.'
Slipping the pistol back, she went on, `Our men nearly always keep a pistol in their cars. Tempers here are quick and there have been occasions when a dispute about the right of the road has been settled by an exchange of bullets.'
With a smile he said, `I see I've a lot to learn about Mexico.' She made a graceful curtsey. `It will be my pleasure, sir, to be your instructress. And now, I think, we will go back to the restaurant.'
Retrieving the long muslin wrap, Adam disentangled the knife from it and put it in his pocket as a souvenir. Then, as he draped the wrap about her, he planted a light kiss on one of her splendid shoulders. She took no exception to that, but at once set off at a walk and began to talk about places she meant to take him to. A quarter of an hour later they rejoined her father's party.
I t was nearly four o'clock in the morning before Adam got to bed. Snuggling down, he sighed with contentment. It had been a marvelous evening, and what a girl Chela was. He had not meant to let himself become entangled again with a woman, but he knew he had fallen for her, hook, line and sinker. Recently he had thought a lot, with nostalgic longing, about Mirolitlit. But she had been dead for close on a thousand years, whereas Chela was here in Mexico City, alive, warm flesh and blood, and had not disguised her desire to see a lot more of him.
But there was more to it than that. He knew now that, although the physical appearance of the two girls was so different, the indefinable likeness he had sensed between their personalities was not a coincidence. The gesture that Chela had made with her wrap to save him from being knifed was precisely the same as that Mirolitlit had made when saving him from the knife of the Chichimec bearer. Now he had not the least doubt that Chela was a reincarnation of Mirolitlit.
CHAPTER 5
Out of the Past
IN SPITE of the late hour at which Adam got to bed, he had had himself called at nine o'clock because it had been arranged that Chela should call for him at eleven. A swim in the pool on the ground floor of the hotel thoroughly revived him and he breakfasted heartily off an omelette, delicious hot, white rolls and tropical fruit. Then, dressed in a smart grey, lightweight suit of terylene and worsted, he went down to face the day, bursting with renewed vitality.
Chela was only half an hour late. She arrived in a long, low, open car, dressed in primrose tweeds and wearing over her hair a bright red scarf, the ends of which streamed out behind her. As he climbed into the car, he said gaily:
`I hope you've got your gun; because I've a hunch that you plan to drop me off among a gang of Mexican bandits, just to watch my reactions, and I'm not used to dealing with that sort of situation.'
`Not today,' she laughed. `We'll save that for later, when you are a little more acclimatized.'
Turning out of the Reforma, she took another six lane motorway, the Avenida Insurgent’s, which led south to Acapulco. Adam had never owned a car until two months earlier he had bought his Jaguar and hired a chauffeur valet to drive it. That had been a very pleasant experience; but here, in the centre of Mexico City, he found driving with anyone terrifying. Unlike many modern cities, it did not consist mainly of parallel streets enclosing square blocks, but had many focal points from which, like the rays of a star, the streets led in all directions, cutting across others at sharp angles. There were innumerable traffic lights, the working of which it was difficult to decipher, and, very frequently, the Mexicans ignored them. They seemed, too, to be a speed crazed people; for, in their determination to get ahead, they constantly left one line of traffic without warning, to cut in across the front of a car in another. The number of cars with bent bumpers and dented sides testified to the very real danger of entering this packed mechanical jungle.
Wedged in the fast moving stream, his fear tempered only by
admiration, Adam sat tight as Chela drove with superb self confidence, at never less than forty and sometimes up to eighty miles an hour, past heavily laden lorries and other less speedy vehicles. Then, as they approached a great complex of lofty buildings, she slowed down and said
`This is our University City. It occupies five hundred and fifty acres of what was formerly waste land; over a hundred and fifty of our best architects and engineers worked for four years to build it, and it cost three hundred million pesos.'